Gamasutra Member Blogs: From personalization's price to better tools

In highlights from Gamasutra's Member Blogs, our bloggers write about diverse topics, such as building better tools for game design, the price of personalization, the myth of casual competition, and more. Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals. We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines. This Week's Standout Member Blogs The myth of casual competition (Daniel Steckly) Daniel Steckly looks at whether or not casual gaming is taking money from the AAA market. SPOILER WARNING: It's not. Modern gaming trends: Achievements (Corey Moore) Achievements are everywhere these days, and many players will spend hours trying to get them all. Corey Moore asks, "Are achievements really a good measure of player accomplishment? How do they affect the gaming experience?" Disrupted familiarity as game-specific storytelling (Alfred MacDonald) Games have the capability of immersing the player in an environment and creating a familiarity not possible in movies or novels. Alfred MacDonald believes that playing with this familiarity as a storytelling device is unique to video games and part of game design as an art. Building better tools for game design (Aleksander Adamkiewicz) The barrier of entry for game design and development has been significantly lowered since the days of Pong, argues Aleksander Adamkiewicz. Unfortunately it's still not low enough for most people to participate in the process. The price of personalization (Josh Bycer) Giving players freedom of choice when playing a game seems like a no-lose situation. But Josh Bycer says that choice is one of the major causes of imbalanced game design.